I want to keep learning, keep exploring, keep doing more.
If I were not able to separate the art from the artists, I think I would limit myself a great deal, and life wouldn't be nearly as interesting.
One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.
It takes a caring community to raise a child that will be a whole person and a contributing citizen.
A person has the right, and I think the responsibility, to develop all of their talents.
I enjoy reading about the lives of musicians, and find many similarities in their ideas of preparation and their utter devotion to this great, eternal language: music.
'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.
I try to frighten my very young colleagues into studying and understanding their voices before they attempt things that are beyond them. It's wise to take gymnastics and swimming to strengthen the body, because people don't realise what an athletic undertaking singing actually is.
I'm dying always.
I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.
We singers have a different level of responsibility from other musicians. We have words that we must convey; we have meanings that we must convey through these lyrics.
I am deeply spiritual; I revel in those things that make for good - the things that we can do to shed a little light, to help place an oft-dissonant universe back in tune with itself... Long live art, long live friendship, long live the joy of life!
I have a particular affliction. I am unable to say a word I can't spell.
I wasn't born Austrian; I wasn't born German. My roots are from Africa, and I do not have any reason for not wanting to celebrate that. Every time that I can, I like to kind of mention it, you know, just to keep people sort of knowing exactly what's going on. My French is pretty good, but I'm still African, thank you very much.
It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.
I sing in languages that I speak. So when I'm singing a Schubert song, I know precisely what every word means and, you know, when it was composed and who was the poet and all of that and whether Strauss or Wagner or French Belioz, Duparc or Debussy or whatever.
I would like to see more African-American singers as part of our opera companies. If you take music and the arts out of the public schools, then you're going to lose a lot of people that you might have discovered were talented, very early.
I'm a sloucher, sort of, when nobody's looking.
There is a lot of propaganda about opera singers not being able to act. That's not necessarily true and hasn't been true for a very long time. And certainly there were those instances when singers were told they need to fit into a certain size dress. Of course, women. Men? They just make the costume bigger.
I walk an 11-minute mile without huffing and puffing.
